Case Study

Jerusalem

Basic Facts

Mixed subtropical semiarid climate with warm dry summers and cool rainy winters

0

Population

0
km2 /
0
sq mi

Area

0
m /
0
ft

Elevation

0
mm /
0
inches

Annual precipitation

since
0

Agam implementation

0

Irrigation valves

0

Controllers

0

Users

One of the oldest cities in the world and a holy place for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Jerusalem is located in the Judaean Mountains between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. The city of Jerusalem is not located near any major river or water source, nor does it experience much rain fall. It includes two main areas with distinct climate conditions. The area that leads to the Judeah Desert, which is mostly dry and arid, and the area that leads to the lowland area, which is greener.

Challenges

Radio communication issues

For many years Jerusalem had a radio-based central irrigation control system. Due to the city’s topography, the system experienced many technical issues concerning radio frequency interference. The sites were often offline and not accessible, faults were not consistently monitored, etc. However, even when the system was functioning, it was not in real-time. Any command that was sent to the valve could take a long time to reach it, because the system communicated only within pre-defined time-windows. The result was significant water waste due to valves that remained open while communication was lost, uncontrolled irrigation, and the general inability to control the irrigation from the field.

Operational challenges

Jerusalem is divided into 27 sections, each with its own contractor, manager, supervisor, irrigation expert, and more. Allowing hundreds of stakeholders to use the previous system was merely impossible. The onboarding and user management of staff was not suited for this scale. This meant that most users were not able to utilize the system.

Agam’s Real-Time Irrigation Solution

Real-time cellular-based communication

Agam’s landscape irrigation solution is based on cellular communication with a central cloud-based monitoring and control system. Today, Jerusalem has almost 200 users, where each user can monitor the areas under their responsibility and conveniently control the irrigation in real time through a laptop or mobile phone.

Read more >

Water optimization through precise quantity-based irrigation

Rather than relying solely on predetermined irrigation schedules, Jerusalem uses Agam’s solution to specify precise quantity-based irrigation and real-time control and monitoring of every valve throughout the entire city, resulting in substantial water savings.

Read more >

Two meteorological stations update the coefficient irrigation rate

Jerusalem has deployed two meteorological stations and also receives data from an external meteorological service. These stations feed actual weather data, such as rainfall measurements, evapotranspiration trends, winds, elevation, etc. to Reco, Agam’s cloud-based irrigation management system. Based on this data, the coefficient rate is updated daily, and it is fed to each individual irrigation controller in the field, according to its geographical location, to determine the precise irrigation quantity needed. The addition of the meteorological stations has contributed an additional 20%-30% water savings.

Read more >

Independent user management and onboarding of personnel

Through Agam’s comprehensive Management module, Jerusalem manages its vast staff comprising almost 200 users, including external contractors, inspectors, managers, and more. The permissions are configured independently (i.e., without Agama’s involvement), where each staff member or contractor is allocated their respective area and designated controllers. The staff member or contractor can monitor and control their controllers, even from the field using their mobile phones, and receive notifications on faults, such as high/low flow errors, uncontrolled irrigation alerts, consumption deviations, and more. Staff members and contractors can also onboard their own staff, configure their permissions and monitor their work.

Read more >

We have been working with Agam for over 17 years now. Agam introduced a new irrigation monitoring technology that is based on cloud and cellular communication. Through Agam we have drastically improved our control of the field units and dramatically improved our ability to manage the operational staff. The solution’s support for large scale deployments allowed us to grow the deployment on a yearly basis, while at the same time increase our efficiency in terms of the water consumption and staff utilization.

Yoram Mizrahi, Yurgan LTD.

Gardens Development & Maintenance